Make It In America

Floor Speech

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Mr. CASTRO of Texas. First of all, thank you, Congressman, for your leadership on this issue and on this legislation Make It In America. Thank you to Congressman Delaney for all of the work that he's doing on infrastructure.

In Texas, infrastructure obviously is very important to us. We have a State that, obviously, is incredibly large in land mass, second only to Alaska. We have, for example, the most number of bridges of any State in the Nation, miles and miles of interstate highways and roads.

So I stand here tonight with you to reaffirm the point that we must never neglect our infrastructure of transportation; building out our roads, our highways, our waterways, our mass transit systems, making sure that Americans can get to where they want to go by air, by land, by sea. We must make sure that our infrastructure of transportation keeps up also and is competitive with that of places in Europe and in Asia, particularly for commercial purposes.

But also, Congressman, I wanted to point out that just as there is an infrastructure of transportation, there is in America another kind of infrastructure, and that is an infrastructure of opportunity that allows each of us to pursue our American Dreams. So, for example, just as there are streets and highways that help us get to where we want to go on the road, there is an infrastructure of opportunity in America that allows us to get to where we want to go in life. That infrastructure of opportunity would include, for example, great public schools and universities, a strong health care system in an economy that's built around well-paying jobs so that people can support themselves and their family members.

In fact, when we ask the question here in Congress: What is it that distinguishes America from among the nations of the world, I would argue that it is the fact that over the generations, Americans have come together to build out that infrastructure of opportunity that allows each of us, no matter our race, our class, where we come from, allows each of us to chase our American Dream.

I think all of us understand, and I think you would agree with me, I have never met any American who has asked for a guarantee of success in our Nation. Folks don't ask for a guarantee of success. What they ask for is the opportunity to pursue that success. So we must continue building not only the roads that we need and the highways, but also the great schools and universities, a strong health care system, and as you mentioned, with the American Jobs Act making sure that Americans can go to work and support themselves and their family.

I will just wrap up with this. There has been a lot of debate around here, and I know in the last hour there was, about immigration. There is a big debate about how to handle our immigration issue. That is a challenge and has been a challenge for this Congress.

But if you put aside the debate over what to do with folks who are here, whether it is visas or permanent legal residency, whatever it is, and we just ask ourselves, why is it for a few hundred years now that America has been the destination Nation for people from literally every corner of the Earth, why is that, I would argue it is because we have built up a place, a society of opportunity where people can pursue their dreams.

Congressman, I think you would agree with me, in all of the immigrants I've met, whether they came from Europe or Asia or Mexico or somewhere else, I've never heard anybody tell me that the reason they came to our country was because they were looking for the lowest corporate tax rate. People, in fact, come here because they are looking to be part of a system of opportunity that as Americans we have built up together. We must make sure, all of us in Congress, working as Republicans and Democrats united for our country, make sure that when somebody asks 50 years from now or 100 years from now, where is it on Earth that people want to be, that the answer is still ``the United States of America.'' We must build out the infrastructure of transportation and the infrastructure of opportunity to achieve that answer.

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Mr. CASTRO of Texas. Thank you, Congressman.

I would point out, for example, in Texas, we have our challenges. In California, for example, you have nine research universities, which are the top-tier universities. In New York, they have about seven. In Texas, we only have three right now, so we have a long way to go to catch up.

We are trying to catch up. In fact, there was a bit of good news. Governor Perry today signed a bill that would merge two schools, two colleges, two universities, in what is known as the Texas Valley in south Texas, and ultimately will create a medical school.

That is very important for a few reasons. I want to use real quick this example in the Texas Valley in south Texas along the Texas-Mexico border, which is often in conversation here in Congress. It is a place of about between 1 million and 1 1/2 million folks, very hardworking people, wake up early in the morning, go to work, put in a hard day's work without complaint, and then go home to their families, often go home and say prayers of thanks to God for what He has given them.

In that area known as the Texas Valley, cities like Edinburg and McAllen and Weslaco and Brownsville, did you know that you still can't get a medical degree anywhere in that area, anywhere south of San Antonio, my hometown? You can drive the 4 hours between San Antonio and the Texas-Mexico border and not be able to get a medical degree. You can't get a law degree anywhere between San Antonio and the Texas-Mexico border. And there are only a handful of Ph.D. programs.

So when I speak of missing pieces, literally, of the infrastructure, to me the Texas Valley is one example of that. I know many folks like Congressman Hinojosa, Congressman Cuellar, Congressman Vela, they're working very hard to change those things; but those changes have been slow in coming.

I will also point out with regard to the infrastructure of transportation, which is part of the infrastructure of opportunity, something that is also missing. For example, when you try to drive--my fiancee is from a small town called Alton, Texas, right near Mission, a few miles from the Texas-Mexico border--when you drive from San Antonio down to the Valley, you drive those 4 hours or so and there is no continuous interstate highway that you can take without stopping in town after town.

So you can imagine what that means to a traveler, but even more so what it means for commercial enterprises, for our businesses that are trying to do trade, trying to get their goods to Mexico, or importing their goods from Mexico. Those things are very, very important; and we've got to continue to do this great work that you've been a leader on.

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Mr. CASTRO of Texas. I think, Congressman, when we think about issues that come up here, issues that sometimes succumb to the gridlock that is Congress these days--for example, on the student loan issue--that's why it's so important that we make sure that we do right by students and not allow that student loan interest rate to double. In these tough economic times, it's hard enough for families to scrounge up the money to help send their kids to college and for the kids to work a job or two and go to class. They're often in this work-school tug-of-war where many of them work part-time or full-time and at the same time take their 15 hours or 12 hours to graduate in a decent number of years. The least that Congress can do is make sure that we set a student loan rate that is affordable and reasonable for the economic times that we live in.

Those things are not handouts. Those are investments to make sure that you've got a well-educated population. These are loans, after all. They're paying these back. It's also, I think, their government saying, Look, we're going to lend you this money at a decent rate--we're going to make sure it comes at a reasonable rate--and you're going to pay it back to us, but from that, we're going to get folks who are engineers, who are police officers and firefighters and doctors and all of the things that keep our society moving and keep this country the greatest Nation on Earth.

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Mr. CASTRO of Texas. I couldn't agree more.

Just personally, I started college in the fall of 1992--21 years ago now. In 1991 or 1992, my mom made less than $20,000, and she was getting ready to send two twin sons--of course I have my brother--off to Stanford University in northern California. You can imagine how daunting that was, but there is no way that my brother and I could have gone to college and graduated without student loans--without Perkins loans, without Stafford loans. It was the same thing for law school. So these are vital. I mean, that's just my own story. There are literally millions of stories like that across the country.

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Mr. CASTRO of Texas. We know, of course, Congressman, that the sequester was taking a meat cleaver rather than trying to do real smart cuts, so I agree with you on that.

With respect to the work of the Army Corps of Engineers, the important work that they do, it is often felt in San Antonio and in Texas, of course, during everything that happened with Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and all of the important work they had done around that. So you're right. I think that Americans expect that they will be in homes that are not going to flood and that there is going to be infrastructure in place to make sure that water doesn't come up and run them out of their homes and ruin their homes and their properties.

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Mr. CASTRO of Texas. You make an important point about neglect of that infrastructure, not only with levees and with waterways, but you and I are both aware, as is the country, of the tragic examples over the last several years--in Minnesota, for example, in the bridge collapse, and more recently in Washington, I believe, in that bridge collapse. Those are lessons to this Congress that we cannot neglect our infrastructure. It is vital. I mentioned Texas. By that same report that Congressman Delaney mentioned, we have about 1,300 bridges that have been declared functionally obsolete. That's 1,300 functionally obsolete bridges in Texas. That's one in six. So those are things that we've got to attend to here.

It also begs the point: whether it's building out the infrastructure of transportation or building out the infrastructure of opportunity, that doesn't happen by itself. It doesn't happen by accident. It doesn't happen by luck. The United States Government and the Congress must make those smart investments. We must continue to make those investments if we are going to be the land of opportunity not just 5 years from now or 20 years from now but 50 and 100 years from now.

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